Obamacare Will Save Medicare $200 Billion by 2016

Here's an inconvenient fact for Mitt Romney and the Republicans: Obamacare will save for $200 billion for the Medicare by 2016 and $208 billion for Medicare patients by 2020.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services actuary reports:

"We have achieved significant tangible savings that have been passed on to beneficiaries," said Jonathan Blum, director of the Center for Medicare. "There's a tremendous opportunity for even greater savings." [...]
The new numbers are based on savings so far: 32.5 million people used preventive services last year with no costs to themselves, senior citizens saved $3.2 billion for prescription drugs that fall in the "doughnut hole" in 2010 and 2011, and the government recovered $4.1 billion in 2011 in anti-fraud efforts.

CMS also projected savings based on portions of the health care law that will be enacted soon, such as penalties for hospitals for readmitting patients for the same health episode, and paying providers based on quality standards.

If the Republican Party gets its way, it will repeal President Obama’s health care law wholesale. Mitt Romney’s committed to repealing it, as are the party’s congressional leaders and rank-and-file members on Capitol Hill. That’s the plan if they win big in November — unless the Supreme Court beats them to the punch and overturns the entire law.

According to the Democratically-appointed public trustee of the Medicare program, that wouldn’t just spell doom for “Obamacare,” but for Medicare and the entirety of the country’s ailing health care system.
“I’m not saying so much that I think the policies in the Affordable Care Act are the right ones or great ones — but should the court overturn the whole thing … or should the election be won in which this is a big issue and as a result of the outcome the winning party decides it has to gut the thing, what will happen is the momentum, which is disorganized but seems to be all moving in the right direction, will not just slow to a crawl but shift into reverse,” said economist and Urban Institute President Robert Reischauer, speaking on a panel at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Reischauer said a confluence of government and private-sector activity are, in a self-reinforcing way, moving the country’s health care system in a more sustainable direction. A big reason for this, he noted, is the steps the government is taking to implement the Affordable Care Act.

On top, and perhaps in part as a result of that, health care cost growth has slowed dramatically in recent years.

“[F]or the last three years health care costs — whether it’s national health expenditures or Medicare — have been lower than people expected,” Reischauer said. “Something’s going on, and you can attribute only so much to the weakness of our economy. That would have shown up with vengeance much earlier and it wouldn’t have been as sustained as this seems to be.”